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ISTE 2016 reveals the edtech field to now be
significantly maturing, employing sophisticated technologies to provide
crowdsourced instructional, assessment, and professional development
items for teachers by teachers; rich, easy-to-use content, and dedicated
to developing and supporting student creativity. Yeah!

Okay, unpack bag? Check! Wash dirty socks? Check! Sort out all business cards and session handouts? Check! Write my annual piece on what got my heart and mind racing at ISTE? Here we go:
Yes, as its previous incarnations did, ISTE 2016 came through big
time on its promise: to deliver more brilliant edtech to
understanding-hungry educators packed into a single venue, more
next-level thoughts whizzing around one’s head, more wonderful new tech
items to ponder and covet, and more reasons and hunches to make an
educator feel good about being a teacher at this particular moment in
time than any other program or event I can imagine!

It’s not enough just to jump into the digital pool,
[solution providers] must be clear about which resources support and
establish practices that truly reflect advances in pedagogical concept
and theory, and that further offer practical, effective ways to put them
into to use with real kids in actual classrooms.

After returning from a previous incarnation of this conference in the
not-too-distant past, I wrote about my having collided there with
abundant evidence that the field of edtech had split into two realities,
two distinct paradigms. One that fully supports the forward thinking,
bleeding-edge of progressive teaching and learning as manifested in
practices like Project-Based Learning, student online publishing,
educational gaming, social media-based class exchanges, and the like.
And the other, steeped in and misguidedly dedicated to preserving a
19th-century style, traditional, teacher-centered instruction. In my
mind, this variety changes students’ school experience only
superficially through the application of a veneer of digitization
comprised of things like digital, but traditionally formatted digital
textbooks; online summative assessments; and the same old, tired
worksheets dressed up with a tad of digital animation.

I think this take on the state-of-the-field of just a year or two ago
was pretty much on the money, considering that over the past few months
the edtech literature has informed us that the industry dedicated to
supporting schools in their digital transformation has reported a
savvier customer base; school personnel who are now well aware that it’s
not enough just to jump into the digital pool, that they must be clear
about which resources support and establish practices that truly reflect
advances in pedagogical concept and theory, and that further offer
practical, effective ways to put them into to use with real kids in
actual classrooms.

I wasn’t at the conference long this year before I began to realize
that a still newer reality is now coalescing to redefine the field of
Educational Technology, actually the entire field of Education. In the
past, edtech was fully embraced primarily by that minority of teachers
and schools who confidently understood the shifts in the goals of
education that are reflected in progressive frameworks like the ISTE
Standards and 21st Century Learning. These were forward
thinkers, willing to take on the risks involved in leaving the comfort
zone of the known, traditionally-run classrooms model.

At the other end of the spectrum, districts feeling pressure to
“integrate technology” were willing to dabble in it, but only so far as
they could keep a digitized version of teacher-centered control of
traditional curriculum going, and adopting tech resources and practices
that would help them accomplish that.

Hitting the Sweet Spot
This year, what I witnessed throughout the conference, is the
emergence of a mature sweet spot, an area of informed and sophisticated
technology-supported instruction, and importantly, a body of emerging
resources to make being part of this phenomenon easy for so many
educators out there who currently sense that they need to become part of
this transformation. There seems to have evolved a wonderful middle
ground comprised of resources and practices that bring the benefits of
appropriate personalization, increased student engagement, and
progressive pedagogy; things like constructivist-aligned social learning
and authentic activities into a comfortably redefined classroom
experience.